My Best Friend Brother

Chapter two

Scarlett POV

I smiled to myself remembering how I first met my best friend. I was in fourth grade when Annika, shy and dark-skinned, was introduced to our class. She had a slight English accent from having lived in London since birth, and this only confused everyone in our classroom even more.

“What is she?” someone whispered

indiscreetly. I saw a flicker of pain in her eyes and I instantly wanted to protect her.

I hung back at first, slightly intimidated by her mysterious differences from the rest of us, but we bonded quickly one day when things got out of hand at the elementary school playground. “My dad says you’re going to hell,” sneered Colby, a blonde boy with a thick Texas drawl. I remember seeing Annika freeze on square number four in hopscotch, her eyes filling with tears. Colby’s father was the pastor of Fairview

Baptist Church, so Colby thought himself qualified to evaluate the spiritual correctness of everyone around him. My dad had brought me to that church once or twice on Easter, and I distinctly recall the looks of pity from the older women in their tailored Sunday dresses with matching hats. It bothered me so much even as a child that I begged we never go back.

So we didn’t. A small crowd gathered around the confrontation on the school playground. With his “congregation” growing, Colby got even bolder. “Annika, why do you hate Jesus?” he asked threateningly, standing two inches from her frightened face. The crowd of 9-year-olds echoed his line of questioning, getting angry and restless. As a social reject myself, I had nothing to lose, so I stepped in. “Leave her alone…or you’ll regret it,” I shouted with a clenched fist to back it up. Colby laughed, calling my bluff. So I punched him. I almost got kicked out of school, but I made a friend for life in Annika. In fact, she was my only friend growing up and we were fiercely loyal to each other, like sisters. Her mother, Mrs. Bashir, would let me come over and play after school for years, feeding me spice-filled samosas and chicken biryani, and washing it down with large gulps of coconut water from the expensive baby coconuts she ordered from Thailand. She taught me how to add just a pinch of this and a pinch of that to transform plain white rice into something befitting a four star Indian restaurant. Even better, Annika let me have free reign over her mountains of toys in her perfectly pink room. We giggled together uncontrollably and played hide-and-seek for hours. As we got older, we discussed boys with such depth and curiosity as if they were aliens having just landed on our planet, and we daydreamed together about who we would eventually marry in between obsessively watching The Princess Bride and John Hughes movies. That’s when I started to learn that the Bashir family was a little different from mine. I recalled one such sleep-over when the conversation predictably turned to boys. Stephen Pearsall…he’s the one for you!” I teased Annika from under her pink comforter, lying next to her. Stephen was a freckled-faced, redheaded boy who always seemed to sit next to her, but was too shy to even utter a single word. “No way! I am not marrying a

boy with red hair! Scarlett, that’s bad luck. Besides, would he be red…everywhere?” she asked with a mischievous glint in her eye.

“Why don’t you ask him,” I challenged her. “Or better yet, steal a peek in the boys’ locker room!” We were 13 at the time and starting to think about “real things,” like which hot celebrity we were going to marry and what mysteries lay under a boy’s boxer briefs. We were starting to have sincere and heart wrenching crushes, which seemed to consume us in the most pleasurable way. I always thought Annika secretly pined for Stephen but,for some reason, she would never admit it to me.“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Annika uttered, forlornly burying her face in her ruffled, pink fringed pillow, a far cry from my tattered, plain polyester pillow on my dingy bunk bed back home. “Why? What do you mean?” I asked. It’s just that—well…I can’t marry anyone like him. I have to marry

someone…you know.” She looked at me like I should know. I didn’t have a freaking clue. “With brown hair?” I guessed. No, a boy who is Indian like me. And Muslim.”

Annika looked at me trying

to gauge my reaction. Would I understand? I didn’t. “You’re kidding me! In the United States of America you are actually forbidden to marry someone different from you? I mean, you can’t marry a regular white boy?” I said, feeling and acting very Civil Rights lawyerish.Annika sighed. I noticed a small pang of sadness in her eyes. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “That’s cool,” I said.

“We’ll just have to find the right boy for you.” Annika laughed and threw the

pillow at me. We both knew I still didn’t get it. How could I? No one in my family cared who I would marry.